Identifying the tasks, responsibilities, objectives, skills and work environment required to accomplish a specific purpose within your company is known as a job analysis. While useful for creating job descriptions, a job analysis also plays a key role in the development of training and compensation policies.
Moreover, an effective job analysis can inform recruitment and hiring practices, as well as career development, along with health and safety concerns in addition to regulatory compliance. Further, conducting a job analysis can help establish your employee evaluation, promotion and termination policies. Most of all though, defining and documenting expectations lets workers know what to do to excel at their jobs.
Conducting a Job Analysis
The primary goal of a job analysis is to gain as complete an understanding of what it takes to do a job as possible. The more detail that can be captured the better.
With that in mind, these are the tasks that need to be performed.
1. Define the job.
The first step is to identify the desired outcome of a given set of activities. What is the job meant to accomplish? How does the job fit into your overall business model? How does it help the company achieve its goals and objectives?
2. Review the requirements of the job.
Once identified, it is useful to break the job down into the specific tasks that must be completed. This then will lead to an understanding of the duties required to perform the tasks. In turn, this will help you determine the workforce skills need to accomplish the job, as well as the training that will be required to bring new hires up to speed. This step will also give you a yardstick by which to measure an employee’s performance.
The best way to accomplish this is to interview people currently doing the job, managers who know what is expected of people doing the job and the leadership of the organization. The goal here is to ensure all of the expectations surrounding the job are taken into consideration.
Ideally, these conversations will be accomplished by meeting with these people in person. Doing so is more conducive to triggering discussions that could lead to potentially overlooked revelations.
3. Look over the shoulders of your competitors.
It’s also useful to look around to see how your competitors describe similar positions. Search for job descriptions matching the situation you’re analyzing to see how other organizations define the associated expectations.
5. Identify skills and training.
What is expected from an employee fulfilling this role? What attitudes should the employee have and what behaviors will they be required to execute?
Knowing the tasks that must be performed will lead to an understanding of the required skills required. This, in turn, will inform the development of the training programs you’ll need to implement.
6. Review the completed analysis annually.
As your company grows and evolves, the tasks needed to help it continue to be successful will change as well. For this reason, job analyses should be reviewed periodically to ensure you’re keeping pace with the growth of your business, as well as the expectations of your employees. The last thing you want is your best personnel to be lured away by other companies willing to pay them what their evolved skill sets are worth.
Much of the data you’ll need to make these decisions can be gleaned from annual performance reviews. You should also make a habit of surveying your employees to see how their jobs have evolved. Reviewing manager’s goals and expectations on an annual basis will also aid your efforts to keep pace with change. Regularly reviewing your competitors’ job postings will help in this regard as well.
These steps will help you hire people best suited to the work and develop training programs. Conducting a job analysis based on these guidelines will also help you establish the parameters within which promotions, rewards and raises can be granted for high-performing employees.
With a solid foundation in technology, backed by a BIT degree, Lucas Noah has carved a niche for himself in the world of content creation and digital storytelling. Currently lending his expertise to Creative Outrank LLC and Oceana Express LLC, Lucas has become a... Read more